Based on my personal experience and what I see from others, it seems
that the current ClientTimeout parameter is too generic to be all that
useful with some people at times finding it too short and at other
times too long.

Given the vagaries of Windows/cygwin/rsync, I find that sometimes
BackupPC for the WinXP machines just hangs for hours until the dump is
killed or a timeout is reached (after 20 hours according to the 72000
default).

Here are some quick thoughts on what might be better... 

Directionally, the following intuition should apply:
- If backup is making "progress" above a certain minimum "threshold"
  then don't timeout (unless really long) 
- If "progress" has stopped (or never started), then timeout after a
  certain wait period

Specifically, it seems to me that we should distinguish (at least)
among the following situations for long dump/restore times
1. Large backups/slow links - here we may want to scale the timeout
   proportionately to the estimated size of the backup and inversely
   proportional to the link speed.
   The backup size can either be given by the user (or default) or
   determined based on history or based on some estimate (e.g., size
   of filelist and moving average size of files in filelist)
   The link speed can either be tested at the start of the dump or
   adjusted dynamically based on file transfer speed.

2. Disconnected PC or newly degraded link speed - here it would be
   nice to have a separate "timeout" parameter and to allow for
   various responses to this scenarios which occur frequently with
   laptops and wireless connections

3. Rebooted PC - in this case it may depend on the backup method. For
   'rsync' you might as well stop (and/or restart). For smb and tar
   you may be able to continue

4. Hung backup - here you want to stop if no "activity" (e.g., no
   information) is being transferred for a certain number of seconds
   even though the network link is up.


Jump some thoughts...

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